


Mythology

by jmtorres



Category: Dragaera - Steven Brust
Genre: Backstory, Dragaerans, Easterners, Goddesses, Gods, Other, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-08
Updated: 2005-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:14:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>jcalanthe  asked me for a story about Drien, Morrolan's sex-changing ancestor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mythology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jcalanthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jcalanthe/gifts).



One of the more interesting stories about my patron deity, I learned out East. Not in Fenario, my grandfather's homeland; in a country a ways north of there. They speak a different language and they have different customs and while they worship some of same gods, they give them different names.

Verra, for instance, they portray as a god with two faces. I guess it's not a bad way to portray her, since her face is ever-changing, her being the goddess of chaos. Still, two doesn't seem quite enough to capture all her variety. Verra's only the name of one face. The other face's name is Drien.

That caught my attention pretty quickly, since I know a man who's supposed to be descended from Drien, several generations removed. Of course, I know a woman who's supposed to be descended from Verra, a single generation removed.

Once upon a time, the story goes in these parts, back in the early mists of time, almost before the existence of time itself, there was a man named Drien. He was one of the first elfs, and he took an elf-woman as his wife and had a hundred sons by her. (I can only assume that they think Dragaerans reproduce at the same rate as Easterners, even though they live thousands of years. Actually, most Dragaerans have fewer than three children. Almost all the ones I know personally don't have any siblings at all.)

Drien was a powerful sorcerer (though in the language they speak here, there's no distinction between sorcery and witchcraft--for all I know, Morrolan's ancestor was as much a witch as Morrolan himself). Drien studied and experimented and honed his powers all his life, and there came a time when he became so powerful he turned into a goddess.

In this particular culture, all the powerful magic-users are women. No one takes me seriously as a witch because I'm a man. It's always something... I'd comment on how unusual it is, but in the Jhereg, almost all the sorcerers are women. There you go.

So Drien's incredible power transformed him into a woman, and a goddess, and she took a new name, Verra, and left her elf-wife to travel in the realm of the gods and cavort with her equals.

Except that she didn't stick with cavorting with her equals; she fell in love with another elf, long after her elf-wife had died, and she bore her elf-husband a girl-child, and graced him with her powers. Her powers were too great for the elf-husband to hold, and he destroyed himself with them, and destroyed the girl-child with them, and nearly destroyed the world with them.

The story is close enough to Adron's Disaster that I tend to believe it's true.

Of course, being meddlesome, I had to correct the errors. I told them I traveled to the Halls of the Gods with one of Drien's hundred sons, and rescued the daughter of Verra from death. They said it made a good tale; I don't know if they believed it, but then I don't know whether or not they believed their story about Drien and Verra literally either. The Eastern memory is not as long as the Dragaeran memory, a lot of this story happened hundreds of thousands of years ago, if it happened at all. To some Easterners, the old stories are just stories.

In some Eastern stories about Verra, she has two sisters, though they are rarely told of as more than her shadows, as if they were not as powerful as she, not as godlike. In some Dragaeran stories about Drien, he had two brothers who were both famous in their own right: Kieron, who conquered all the lands that formed the Empire, and Dolivar, who betrayed him and founded the House of Jhereg.

Unfortunately, no one's stories mention if Drien's brothers and Verra's sisters are the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Also archived on dreamwidth: <http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/699602.html>.


End file.
